Quotes from Evan Williams

My strong belief - in being in blogging before Twitter - is that in trying to create more information out there, in trying to create the democratization of media in general, is that the more voices there are out there then the likelihood is that the truth bubbles up to the top.

My life has been a series of well-orchestrated accidents; I've always suffered from hallucinogenic optimism.

Twitter was designed to be this system that you just scan for information that's important or useful to you and then walk away, and if you wanna take a break you take a break.

I tried to be a ski bum when I stepped away from Twitter, and I wasn't a very good skier.

While GeoCities isn't cool, it isn't a bad thing. It did a great thing - enabled great people to instantly publish to the Web.

A key element of Web blogs is the community element. Most blogs are not self-contained; they are highly dependent on linking to each other.

Blogging got the concept of personal publishing, but it didn't really take advantage of the network.

Where you are defines what you're interested in.

The things that keep nagging at you are the ones worth exploring.

I've always had a tendency to be much more optimistic about people than I should be. I'd like to be a little shrewder.

'Vanity pages,' is somewhat of a derogatory term; personal pages are still the heart of blogging, but now there are more topic-oriented blogs. It's really about personal expression, and that's just gotten bigger and broader.

The vast majority of things are distractions, and very few really matter to your success.

Google started out when the dot-com boom was happening. It grew under the radar of big companies that were competing in but basically ignoring search. Then they were able to really invest during the bust for a long time.

Take a human desire, preferably one that has been around for a really long time Identify that desire and use modern technology to take out steps.

Our problem wasn't that it blew up and was impossible to scale, but there were some bad choices made. One of the biggest lessons time after time was to focus. Do fewer things.

There's something about just hanging around when it comes to success on the Internet.

Blogging and traditional media work together. Twitter complements traditional media.

News in general doesn't matter most of the time, and most people would be far better off if they spent their time consuming less news and more ideas that have more lasting import.

After high school, I enrolled at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, but I stayed only a year and a half. I felt college was a waste of time; I wanted to start working.

Be a user of your own product. Make it better based on your own desires. But don't trick yourself into thinking you are the user.

Traditional news is often full of mistakes, but I think that people are getting more sophisticated in knowing what to trust and what not to trust.

I had a blog for many years. Once you develop your readership on your blog, and you can put something out there or direct traffic or get attention - it's like a super power.

I like to think of the world as a sort of a casino, except the house doesn't have the advantage. If you're smart, you have an advantage. It behooves you to place a lot of bets.

The promoted tweet is a real tweet that a company may have sent out that they want more distribution for. They will buy key words for it. If people are looking for something related, it will show up.